The Most Egregious Wicked Marketing Stunts

By
Fran Hoepfner,
a freelance writer who covers pop culture and the Internet

Photo: Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures

Did you know there’s an adaptation of Wicked coming out this month? Did you know it stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande as Elphaba and Glinda? Did you know these characters are often represented by the colors green and pink? Did you know there’s going to be a whole-ass second part coming out last year?

Unless you’ve been on a silent retreat, you likely know that Wicked is out in theaters later this fall. You know this from seeing Erivo and Grande everywhere: sports events, magazine covers, and award shows. Or maybe you know this from walking around Target, where there are Wicked-related products as far as the eye can see. That Wicked is taking a page from Barbie’s “culture jacking” is testing the patience of everyone — from longtime skeptics of the musical (hi) to die-hard fans. Whether people get their butts in seats remains to be seen when the movie comes out on November 22, so for now, let’s digest some of the film’s most annoying and bizarre marketing ploys.

Erivo and Grande have been inescapable all year, popping up at just about every pop culture-related event and even a few that aren’t. Turn on your TV, flip over your laptop, look down at your phone — it doesn’t matter. There they are. Some of these spots, like magazine covers and Ari’s SNL-hosting gig, make perfect sense. This is what actors do when they have a movie to promote. And perhaps none of this would feel so irritating if they weren’t always popping up in Wicked-adjacent color schemes. But they do, so here we are.

“I just came home, and look at what Cynthia and Ariana set up for us,” Kim Kardashian mused on her Instagram Story last week, suggesting that amid all the relentless promo that the two Wicked stars would have time to prop up some cardboard cutouts. That the Kardashian family — sans Kendall — got to see the film early celebrates little beyond the fact that a Skims and Wicked collaboration might be forthcoming, but for longtime Wicked fans, this collaboration has proven one of the most obnoxious. “I feel the studio hasn’t actually understood the story or the message of Wicked. The Kardashians would’ve seen the movie anyway. To honor them in this way goes against everything Elphaba believes in,” wrote one user on Reddit. That celebrities get to see movies early in the comfort and privacy of their own homes isn’t anything new, but Kardashian’s video, showing off piles of toys and other tie-in products, hammered home the profound commodification of this marketing cycle. But still, we’re a little curious to know what North thought of it.

I hear you: It’s normal for celebrities from movies to show up at the Met Gala and do a little bit of cross promotion. For instance, no one is mad that the stars of Challengers were all there — but for one, none of them popped up in tennis-related outfits, and two, that movie had already come out (and beyond that, there’s not even a single photo of all three of them together at the event). But the Met Gala is kind of its own thing with its own theme. When Grande rocked up in her Loewe-designed, pink-hued mother-of-pearl bodice and Erivo stood beside her in a floral Thom Browne suit-skirt combo, it all felt a little obvious. Did these outfits adhere to the “Garden of Time” theme? Okay … but it was hard to see them in those colors and not think, Hmm, I wonder if these two are in a major motion picture where they’ll sport these colors coming out later this year … Their joint appearance at the spring fashion event called to mind when Grimes rocked up in a Tesla-inspired choker.

This one felt like an inevitability: NBC has the Olympics, Universal has Wicked, NBCUniversal has … the cast of Wicked at the Olympics, complete with their signature green and pink colors. There were a lot of celebrities at the Olympics this year, and yes, gymnasts do, to some degree, “defy gravity,” but their color-coordinated appearances felt like a distraction from the actual event. Why not just bombard the Olympics commercial breaks with Wicked trailers? Oh — they did that? Well, never mind. At least they’ve left post-Olympics sports like, say, the WNBA alone, right? Ah.

That there’d be a number of product tie-ins feels standard for a movie and brand of this stature — especially one that seems to be emulating the Barbie marketing (though it obviously helped that the latter film was already based on, well, a product). You may find the Wicked Stanley Cups cheugy or the Aerie collaboration frighteningly reminiscent of 2014, but those products undoubtedly have an audience in people who may want to rep Wicked like it’s a sports team. Though there are several Wicked product tie-ins that just make sense — lookalike dolls, r.e.m. beauty collab — these are three that feel, no matter how much we crunch the numbers, a bit much.

Colored coffee-related products will never not feel like when ketchup could be green to celebrate the magic (?) of Shrek in the early 2000s. While Glinda’s Pink Potion escapes by the skin of its, uh, dragonfruit by being yet another iteration of “pink beverage,” Elphaba’s Cold Brew leaves something to be desired both in taste and appearance. “The Cold Brew is sweetened with peppermint-flavored syrup, topped with silky-smooth non dairy matcha cold foam and colorful green candy sprinkles for an Oz-dusting of magic,” the Starbucks site explains. Got it — the classic three-way combination of coffee flavor, peppermint flavor, and matcha flavor. Plus sprinkles. But let’s go out on a limb and say that those three flavors all taste good together and not like, say, Malort. Does the beverage have that kind of green-into-brownish black ombre? Sadly, no. The best case scenario looks like a greenish tan — not unlike the color palate of the Wicked movie itself.

The overlap between devoted Monopoly heads and Wicked stans is, well, two separate circles, orbiting each other but never meeting in the middle. That a special edition Monopoly board isn’t so bad in and of itself — think Simpsons Monopoly, The Lord of the Rings Monopoly, or even whatever the hell Britney Spears Monopoly is — but the Wicked of it all is directly in conflict with what Monopoly is, a power-grabbing real-estate, economics board game about getting so mad at your dad or brother that you have to storm upstairs. Sure, the case could be made that the high tensions of Monopoly mirror the dissolving friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, but mostly it seems like hiking up the rent in Munchkinland Town Center won’t make anyone feel good.

A lot of the Wicked-related product tie-ins feel like they’re for children, and that’s because they are. Wicked Rice Krispy treats, Wicked Lego sets — if you are an adult who enjoys this kind of thing, go with God, but know the audience to whom these ploys speak. But let’s say you are a grown-up who likes Wicked and that you’d like a real grown-up product for once? How about a casual little Lexus? The luxury SUV starts at a price of around $55,000 and the company advertised the vehicle by intercutting clips from the movie with footage of the car zooming around what is presumably Oz and not a random Slovakian forest.

If the Wicked marketing was powerful enough to, say, introduce two new Lexus SUVs in a rich forest green and bubblegum pink, maybe we’d be having a different conversation. That’d be bold enough to get our attention. But a regular — albeit expensive car — doing a paid partnership with Wicked wherein neither star of the film ever appears in the car itself doesn’t defy gravity.

The Target commercial featuring a number of happy consumers singing “Defying Gravity” while purchasing Wicked-themed products from Target that ends in an Erivo cameo might be the defining gesture of Wicked’s marketing: a concocted ad that both sells a product and features one of the film’s stars. “Although I agree that the message of the film goes against the consumerism we’ve seen, the studio needs to generate enough hype and word of mouth to get people to buy tickets,” said one user on the Wicked subreddit. What feels most frustrating for these performers is the extent to which their marketing has ignored the work they’ve done, the months of training and filming, so they can show off the products and clothing associated with it rather than the film itself. Erivo and Grande are undoubtedly proud of what they’ve done, but they’ve spent all year shilling crap rather than the film itself. But hard work doesn’t sell. Toys sell. Stanley cups sell. The Kardashians sell. Universal wants to avoid another In the Heights or West Side Story situation — movie musicals that don’t translate or find a new audience or bring people out to the theater for a big-screen experience. Wicked, however, got big and stayed big for a reason. It’s time to let it stand on its own ruby slippers.

The Most Egregious Wicked Marketing Stunts